UFOMYST
CaseFireball1997

Las Cruces, NM, USA

Orange, glowing ball moving at height of 50 to 300 feet over and around a city park (Apodaka Park). Pursued by 2--3 helos w/searchlight

Report quality: Moderate55/100

This score reflects report-quality signals on file — how complete, corroborated, and precisely located the report is — not a claim about whether the sighting was a real craft.

  • Duration parsed: 3150s, a plausible sighting length
  • Detailed witness text (135 characters)
  • Location geocoded exactly
  • No other reports from this city within 3 days
When
1997-07-15
Where
Las Cruces, NM, USA
Shape
Fireball
Duration
45--60 min
Geo
32.312, -106.778 · exact
Slug
fireball-over-las-cruces-nm-1997-ff8540
Wave

Part of a wave

  • Historical wave1997

    The Phoenix Lights

    Arizona, USA (Phoenix–Prescott–Tucson corridor)

    The largest mass sighting in modern U.S. history — actually two events: an enormous silent V of lights (many insisted one solid craft blotting out stars) crossing the state around 8pm, and a string of stationary lights…

    Open wave →
Local cluster

Local cluster

This sighting is part of a small burst — 3 Las Cruces, NM reports filed in July 1997.

In context

  • Las Cruces, NM shows up 85 times across the archive.
  • 24 reports came from New Mexico in 1997.
  • In the 1990s, 6.8% of reports described a fireball — the all-time rate is 6.9%.

Nearby in space & time

within 30 days

Report

Full narrative lands with dossier import for famous cases, or the NUFORC free-text summary above for standard reports. This shell is SSR-ready: one D1 row (including connections_json) per page.